Obvious Things You 0nly Just Realised - 2020

[JaDanketies]

Wac-a-Mole

Fascinating stuff!

[Sebastian Cobb]

They're just taking food out of the mouth of the splat the rat guy really.

[touchingcloth]

Fascinating stuff!

Truly! The whole idea of the hidden world of funfair amusement machine software development is in itself an 0bv10us thing to me - of course someone has to write the code for them, but the idea that the skill set is niche enough and the market lucrative enough for someone to offer $500,000 to buy the IP is kind of mind blowing. Probably that's because I come across funfairs and amusement arcades so infrequently that I'm ignorant of how many of them there are worldwide, and also the fact that in my mind the machines always have a bit of a jury-rigged quality to them so my intuition was probably that they're assembled in someone's garage rather than mass produced.

I'd quite like to see Christopher Guest tackle the scandal-ridden world of funfair software, I can imagine a mockumentary somewhere between Best in Show and King of Kong.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I imagine something like wac a mole wasn't coded in the way we think of it. More likely off the shelf integrated circuits and transistorised logic. This is mostly a guess on my part.

Old arcade stuff is interesting. It's surprising how many of them have hardware design flaws in them, so they have got cut traces and patch cables soldered between things etc.

[touchingcloth]

Yeah I imagine it's more akin to firmware than software development, but either way it's not something I've ever really wondered about, mainly because I don't play all that much Whac-a-Mole any more. More of a Screwball Scramble lad these days.

Codicil: thinking about firmware has made me think of a job I used to have in the exciting world of tape storage. I was involved in the side of the business involved with making rack-mounted tape emulation products, which were purely implemented in software running on top of Linux. There were a lot of firmware engineers kicking their heels around the place, and they somehow managed to convince the emulation to spend an insane sum of cash on a LED status panel[nb]Like what physical rape drives have - a blinking orange LED during rewinds and whatnot. [/nb] which could be mounted in one of the front expansion ports on the emulation servers so they could bring their FPGA muscle to bear where it really wasn't needed. For one thing the things were installed in data centres so no one would be seeing the LEDs, and for another all of the tasks where a status light is useful with physical média are totally different in emulations - no need to see an indication that the tape is seeking forwards when the seek happens instantaneously rather than physically scrolling through feet of tape. At another point they managed to make a case to develop ASIC chips mounted in PCI cards for doing the on-the-fly data compression, which is insane considering the ratios were maybe 4:1 on an average, nothing which would tax even cheap consumer processors.

[buzby]

Truly! The whole idea of the hidden world of funfair amusement machine software development is in itself an 0bv10us thing to me - of course someone has to write the code for them, but the idea that the skill set is niche enough and the market lucrative enough for someone to offer $500,000 to buy the IP is kind of mind blowing. Probably that's because I come across funfairs and amusement arcades so infrequently that I'm ignorant of how many of them there are worldwide, and also the fact that in my mind the machines always have a bit of a jury-rigged quality to them so my intuition was probably that they're assembled in someone's garage rather than mass produced.

Given that Bob's Space Racers charge £4000 for a machine and I'd guess at least 50% of that is profit (Wimberley had asked his per-machine royalty to be upped from $80 to $150), you only have to sell a few hundred to make that $500k back. He had been developing the code for them for nearly 30 years by that point too, and they had sold thousands of machines over that period. I imagine he just wanted a retirement pot and let his customer sort out someone else to carry on development.

I imagine something like wac a mole wasn't coded in the way we think of it. More likely off the shelf integrated circuits and transistorised logic. This is mostly a guess on my part.

Old arcade stuff is interesting. It's surprising how many of them have hardware design flaws in them, so they have got cut traces and patch cables soldered between things etc.

Wac-A Mole is firmware based -  it randomises the popping up of the moles and governs the speed (the game gets faster as the clock counts down), counts the hits, runs the scoreboards and provides the link-up system. Wimberly provided the firmware to Bob's Space Racers burned into EPROMs, for which he was paid a per-machine royalty fee.

The reason why a lot of (especially older) arcade PCBs have cuts and straps on them is due to two things. In the era before before PCB CAD existed, any mods meant having to redraw the artwork by hand (or using rub down graphics), getting new photoresist masks and priniting screens made etc to get a new PCB version produced. This was all time consuming and expensive, so unless you could guarantee your sales would cover the cost of getting a new version produced you would just carry on with modding the original PCBs when hardware bugs were found or components became obsolete.

You see that with popular games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, where there are multiple board revisions as they rolled up hardware fixes, brought second-source manufacturers in to meet demand (illegally so in DK's case) and then went into the cost reduction phase. The arcade game business has always been transitory in nature where the games are never usually produced for more than one or two years, and most of them were never popular or long-lived enough to get past the 'V1.0' hardware version.

If you had a hit on your hands, you wanted the PCBs out the door ASAP, rather than waiting for your hardware engineers to draw up a new PCB version to fix the latest bugs they had found. If you only had a small hardware team you wanted them working on the next game too, rather than polishing the current one. We went through all this with the hardware for System X - only a few of our units (the Subscriber Line Cards, sor the Mk1 Switch Fabric cards and PCM interfaces) ever got into mass production (hundreds of thousands, or low millions of units). The vast majority of boards in System X never got past 10000 units, and a fair proportion of those nver got past 1000 units. Thus we have a lot of modded boards as unless it was a catasterohic bug it mas more cost-effective to implmement a mod pack than spin a new PCB.

Later on, (and well into the CAD era), you had big companies like Taito, Capcom, Namco and Sega developing hardware platforms that just required the change of the ROM board to change the game (ando osmetimes a board with specialised I/O or graphics hardware). SNK's Neo Geo system took that approach to the point that the games came on cartridges rather than requiring PCB stacks to be be assembled.

[touchingcloth]

Is the edit glitch a firmware problem?

[JesusAndYourBush]

There's a much older whackamole which dates back to the 1940's or older, a fairground game which was basically a piece of drainpipe and a guy dropped an old brush down the pipe and you had to whack it with a stick when it came out of the other end.  It was basically a test of your reaction time because you didn't know when it was going to drop.  I had a go of one as a child in the mid 70's and was made aware at that time that it was a relic of a bygone era.

[JaDanketies]

There's a much older whackamole which dates back to the 1940's or older, a fairground game which was basically a piece of drainpipe and a guy dropped an old brush down the pipe and you had to whack it with a stick when it came out of the other end.  It was basically a test of your reaction time because you didn't know when it was going to drop.  I had a go of one as a child in the mid 70's and was made aware at that time that it was a relic of a bygone era.

Splat the Rat

https://www.bouncebackcastles.co.uk/category/garden-games/180/splat-the-rat

[JesusAndYourBush]

Aha!

The one in the picture is WAY more fancy than the one I had a go of!

[Sebastian Cobb]

Given that Bob's Space Racers charge £4000 for a machine and I'd guess at least 50% of that is profit (Wimberley had asked his per-machine royalty to be upped from $80 to $150), you only have to sell a few hundred to make that $500k back. He had been developing the code for them for nearly 30 years by that point too, and they had sold thousands of machines over that period. I imagine he just wanted a retirement pot and let his customer sort out someone else to carry on development.

Wac-A Mole is firmware based -  it randomises the popping up of the moles and governs the speed (the game gets faster as the clock counts down), counts the hits, runs the scoreboards and provides the link-up system. Wimberly provided the firmware to Bob's Space Racers burned into EPROMs, for which he was paid a per-machine royalty fee.

The reason why a lot of (especially older) arcade PCBs have cuts and straps on them is due to two things. In the era before before PCB CAD existed, any mods meant having to redraw the artwork by hand (or using rub down graphics), getting new photoresist masks and priniting screens made etc to get a new PCB version produced. This was all time consuming and expensive, so unless you could guarantee your sales would cover the cost of getting a new version produced you would just carry on with modding the original PCBs when hardware bugs were found or components became obsolete.

You see that with popular games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, where there are multiple board revisions as they rolled up hardware fixes, brought second-source manufacturers in to meet demand (illegally so in DK's case) and then went into the cost reduction phase. The arcade game business has always been transitory in nature where the games are never usually produced for more than one or two years, and most of them were never popular or long-lived enough to get past the 'V1.0' hardware version.

If you had a hit on your hands, you wanted the PCBs out the door ASAP, rather than waiting for your hardware engineers to draw up a new PCB version to fix the latest bugs they had found. If you only had a small hardware team you wanted them working on the next game too, rather than polishing the current one. We went through all this with the hardware for System X - only a few of our units (the Subscriber Line Cards, sor the Mk1 Switch Fabric cards and PCM interfaces) ever got into mass production (hundreds of thousands, or low millions of units). The vast majority of boards in System X never got past 10000 units, and a fair proportion of those nver got past 1000 units. Thus we have a lot of modded boards as unless it was a catasterohic bug it mas more cost-effective to implmement a mod pack than spin a new PCB.

Later on, (and well into the CAD era), you had big companies like Taito, Capcom, Namco and Sega developing hardware platforms that just required the change of the ROM board to change the game (ando osmetimes a board with specialised I/O or graphics hardware). SNK's Neo Geo system took that approach to the point that the games came on cartridges rather than requiring PCB stacks to be be assembled.

That's pretty interesting. I think for double sided, but single layer boards my electronics colleagues use a cnc machine to cut traces now. Although they do have a light box and etcher I think they don't bother and for even small runs or anything remotely complex they just send the designs off to third parties.

Although in their case 'electronics' seems to involve more programming arduinos/fpga's these days.

[Ambient Sheep]

There's a much older whackamole which dates back to the 1940's or older, a fairground game which was basically a piece of drainpipe and a guy dropped an old brush down the pipe and you had to whack it with a stick when it came out of the other end.  It was basically a test of your reaction time because you didn't know when it was going to drop.  I had a go of one as a child in the mid 70's and was made aware at that time that it was a relic of a bygone era.

Yeah, we used to have one of those at the village fête when I was a kid in the 70s too.

I think it was homemade: just some long planks of wood nailed together in a suitable fashion to make the chute, and the "rat" was just a long brown bean-bag, rather like those bags of wheat you can buy to put in the microwave to ease your aches and pains.

Was good fun though, and I got quite good at it IIRC.

Never seen any kind of commercial version, though.

[Sebastian Cobb]

They still had splat the rat in my school fete during the 90's.

I saw some photos of that recently. Parents all sat on those small hexagonal tables in the playground complete with pints of bitter from the makeshift bar and big pub ashtrays.

[touchingcloth]

Another rat splattin', Hooch sippin', Kel death believin' child of the 90s here.

[Andy147]

There's a much older whackamole which dates back to the 1940's or older, a fairground game which was basically a piece of drainpipe and a guy dropped an old brush down the pipe and you had to whack it with a stick when it came out of the other end.  It was basically a test of your reaction time because you didn't know when it was going to drop.  I had a go of one as a child in the mid 70's and was made aware at that time that it was a relic of a bygone era.

It came up in the Mitchell and Webb "Casino Royale" sketch (about 4 minutes in).

[greencalx]

My hoover can be used in either a classic upright mode, or you can decouple the flexible suction hose from the floor rollers and attach it to various nozzles to clean corners and crevices. Over time, the brushes in the floor rollers get bunged up with fluff and cat hair, which in the past I have removed by hand.

Today, the obvious thing that I realised is that I could deploy the nozzle mode to defluff the floor brushes. A kind of hoover self-fellatio if you will, although not the kind that gets you laughed at by A&E registrars.

[Dewt]

My hoover can be used in either a classic upright mode, or you can decouple the flexible suction hose from the floor rollers and attach it to various nozzles to clean corners and crevices. Over time, the brushes in the floor rollers get bunged up with fluff and cat hair, which in the past I have removed by hand.

The script for the revival of Keeping Up Appearances could do with a little more work.

[Sebastian Cobb]

"It's pronounced Suchet!"

[JesusAndYourBush]

"A Suchet for Mr. Suchet!"

[phes]

Will Arnett is not a young Bob Odenkirk

[Twit 2]

A logjam comes from when one of those flumes would get jammed by a dead chimp.

[JesusAndYourBush]

..

[Paul Calf]

..

[JaDanketies]

Did you know, in the song Pokerface by Lady Gaga, she says in the chorus / bridge: 'P-p-p pokerface f-f-fuck her face?'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bESGLojNYSo

But hardly anyone noticed, hence it rarely getting censored.

Think I'm just mishearing? Here's Ms Gaga herself admitting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQlNXpPvfh4

[kittens]

exposition in a film/tv show/book/play exposes some information to the audience

[touchingcloth]

Did you know, in the song Pokerface by Lady Gaga, she says in the chorus / bridge: 'P-p-p pokerface f-f-fuck her face?'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bESGLojNYSo

But hardly anyone noticed, hence it rarely getting censored.

Think I'm just mishearing? Here's Ms Gaga herself admitting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQlNXpPvfh4

It sounds like it has plosives to me, so not being familiar with the song and expecting to hear "f-f fuck her face" I actually heard "p-p poker face". Maybe "p-p fuck her face" at a pinch.

[Puce Moment]

exposition in a film/tv show/book/play exposes some information to the audience

In narratological terms, this can be subtextual, and even subconscious, despite usually being discussed in terms of artless exposure of detail in a non-realist way.

[pigamus]

"Blue ticks" on Twitter

They're not blue

[Dewt]

They are if you don't use the dark theme

[studpuppet]

They are if you don't use the dark theme

What pigamus is alluding to is that the surround is blue, but the tick is white.

Mind you, in my Dark Mode the tick is dark blue with a white surround...